Adventures in Mormonism

I’ve got a work project that’s kept me in California for most of the past 6 weeks and is taking me back tomorrow night. It’s been intense enough, the hours long enough, that I’ve had little energy left to post here or on my other blogs. But I’ve got some things to post about, and I’ll try to do at least one each week.

In the meantime, here’s my first honest-to-goodness struggle with COVETING in some time.  Fear not; the fever dream has faded; if we get a second car, it will likely be one of the aging $2000 pickup trucks parked by roadsides in our neck of the woods. But it was a nice few weeks.  ..bruce..

Aha! I appear to have Google’s blessing again. This whole process was much quicker than my prior Google-banning experience with another of my blogs. ..bruce..

The delete-and-restore process deleted all user IDs, so you’ll need to register again to leave comments. Sorry!  ..bruce..

This site appears to have been hacked with a bunch of link redirections inserted in the front page, which is why Google purged me from their indices. I did an XML backup of the site’s contents, wiped out my entire public_html directory, reinstalled the latest version of WordPress, and then restored the contents. If you run into flakiness, that’s why.  ..bruce..

It appears that this site was purged completely from Google sometime on the evening of December 6th. I have no idea why. This means, of course, that not only are no Google searches coming to this site, but that the site has likely lost whatever ‘authority’ it had in the Google search algorithm.

Anyone with suggestions as to why this may have happened?  ..bruce..

One of my favorite features of the Sitemeter monitoring service that I subscribe to is that I can see the actual search strings that people typed into Google or other search engines that led them to this blog. The single most common set of search strings combine “Mormon” or “LDS” with “Obama”. A fair number of people do searches on “adventures in mormonism”, for reasons that entirely escape me (I chose the name based on a lingering fondness for the late 80s movie, “Adventures in Babysitting”). But what I find most fascinating are the one-off searches that somehow lead here. Here are a few recent example; quotes are from the search strings themselves; all typos and grammatical errors are preserved:

• “was actually” logic
• repo book
• texas supreme court order mail or person
• stone to leave for family when rapture occurs
• latter day saint church how many private jets
• thomas s monson – the antichrist
• recorded aether hyperspace
• victorian old man clip art
• lds, mormon, eye color
• pbs conspiracy mormon jehovah
• which temple does mitt romney attend
• “one last stolen look”
• grandpa mormon beliefs
• rights of senior missionary companions
• does the lds loves obama
• is the mormon church ran by aliens
• mormon sounds
• exobiology characteristics
• sword turns into milk
• the brothers karamazov edmund fuller less pages
• is it ok for mormon kids to hug
• mormon church mt. shasta
• mormon sheep
• mormons have no personal debt
• michelle obama is mormon?
• lds mission presidents excommunicated
• dave berry mormon
• bipolar mormon
• mormon caverns salt lake city
• is there a jared in lehi whose last name starts with an f,
• mormon clue board game
• mormon clothing and men
• “they might be giants” mormon
• b.y.u. theme song 1945

Those are all hits within the last 3 weeks (and taken from the most recent 2000 hits on this blog).  ..bruce..

This website purports to rate the reading level of a given blog. Here’s its rating for this blog:

I’d like to think it’s because of the thoughtful and intellectual nature of the posts here. But it probably just shows that I’m pedantic. (If you think that’s bad, check out my business website.)  ..bruce..

…it’s just me, trying out some new WordPress themes on this site. If you see one you like (or don’t like), just leave a comment and let me know.

[UPDATED 12/06/07] I’ve also been working to redirect all AIM web traffic from the old site to the new one. If you get any broken links, please let me know.  ..bruce..

Up until now, this blog has operated as a subdirectory on another one of my domains (brucefwebster.com). However, I recently upgraded to a dedicated server for all my websites, so I have converted this blog to its own separate web site. Most of the WordPress data came over just fine; however, anyone who was previously registered in order to leave comments will have to do so again.

Other than that, things seem to have gone well. Oops. Just noticed that the blogroll didn’t come over.

I also think that I have most of the redirection working correctly and automatically; please let me know if you’re experiencing problems. Now to see if I can fix the blogroll stuff…yep, but had to bring them over manually. Since this is a trial run for setting up my other blog as its own web site, I’m glad to do all the learning on this one. ..bruce..

…you might have to leave it again. My comment spam problem went from annoying to overwhelming over the past week (700+ spam comments in just the past few days), and I simply deleted all pending comments, then installed a new anti-comment-spam filter. With luck, that will take care of the problem. ..bruce..